Nowtopian

Labor History right now

This is a review of a couple of books I just wrote for the ILWU’s The Dispatcher.

Low Pay High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor by Andrew Ross (2004, The New Press: New York)
Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870 by Beverly J. Silver (2003, Cambridge University Press: UK)

Longshore workers have been at the fulcrum of global labor for as long as there has been world trade. When the ILWU negotiated the first Mechanization & Modernization agreement back in the late 1950s, no one imagined that container technology would underpin such a radical expansion of globalization, nor that the process of globalization would look an awful lot like the early stages of industrialization dating back to the early 1800s. And yet, entering the second half of the 21st century’s first decade, workers across the planet are confronted by a savage capitalism unleashed since the mid-1970s at least.

Andrew Ross’s book “Low Pay High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor” is an extremely engaging and wide-ranging book. Don’t let the horrible title discourage you. Capitalist ideologues have long used “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” as a bludgeon against workers seeking deeper changes in the set-up of society, so it’s dismaying to see it echoed in this book’s title. In fact, Ross helps us peer into the containers crisscrossing the oceans, not just to see the stuff in them, but also to learn about the people who are producing those commodities in far-off lands and the people who are schlepping and selling them closer to home” and to reveal a great deal about the conditions under which they are working.

If the book was merely an exposÃ© of deplorable working conditions, it would fail to capture the dynamism of this historical moment. Ross begins this book with a detailed look at the “second anti-sweatshop movement” that is confronting the barbaric practices of the fashion industry all over the planet, in factories, malls and the media at home and at factory gates in Indonesia, Vietnam, and even China. Anti-globalization protests get occasional headlines but the everyday organizing of some of its participants is not so well known. United Students Against Sweatshops, Corpwatch, and of course UNITE HERE (AFL-CIO) are all working together and separately to combat the egregious re-emergence of brutal sweatshops, not just in Mexico and China, but in Los Angeles, New York and other U.S. and European cities too.

Andrew Ross is a capable analyst and he does not merely skim the story, highlighting bad corporate practices and well-meaning campaigns to combat them. He sees the anti-sweatshop movement as but one example of a larger historical dynamic underway at this time. The context of this battle in textiles is a decades-long process of market transformation and expansion. His second chapter goes to the small factories of Italy, where the famous brands such as Armani and Gucci arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s and ushered in a whole new market for “Made in Italy” ready-to-wear fashion, as well as design and furniture. This is the birthplace of a key transformation in modern capitalism, covered well in Naomi Klein’s “No Logo”” the rise of commodities dependent on an image of having high aesthetic or creative content. It turns out that this Italian success story too is built on outsourcing, homework and sweatshop labor, not just the mythical flexibility of small producers scattered around northern Italy. Now that China has become the global leader in cheap, quality textiles and clothing, even the famous Italian brands are turning to Chinese manufacturers to keep their much-promoted labels in business.

In fact, under the rules of China’s entrance to the WTO, barriers to Chinese textiles and ready-to-wear clothing are falling and predictably, containers stuffed with cheap Chinese imports are pouring into harbors in the U.S. and Europe, producing unprecedented trade deficits and pushing surviving local manufacturers into ever more drastic efforts to lower labor costs. Politicians are already starting the China-bashing and calling for protectionist tariffs and quotas, even though the global system they’ve helped usher in is the culprit, not any particular government or underpaid workers across the seas.

It’s probably easy to think of textiles and clothing as “other people’s” issues, but Ross has a really illuminating chapter called “Friedrich Engels Visits the Old Trafford Megastore”. In it he describes how sports and fashion have converged over the past decade (how many readers are wearing a sports jersey or cap right now?) to expand the marketing logic of branding in ways we could never imagine as kids in the latter part of the 20th century. The global marketing of such brands as “New York Yankees” or “Chicago Bulls” or “Manchester United” (which often accompanies the purchase of such franchises by global media giants like Murdoch’s News Corp.) follows closely behind the corporate purchase of star athletes as spokespeople (think Michael Jordan or David Beckham), all of which serves to inflate the price of such branded goods while obscuring the enormous profits derived from the exploitation of cheap, mostly female, labor across the planet.

There’s more though. The specific role of Britain and south Asia in this curious global relationship merits a closer look. Not only did the original colonization of India set the stage for Britain’s emergence as an empire, it also gave Britain control over a new global textile industry that had previously been very strong in the Bengal region of India. When Engels described the horrifying conditions in Manchester’s textiles mills in the mid-19th century, he could have never dreamed of what the beginning of the 21st century would bring.

“Manchester [England] and Dhaka [Bangladesh] had changed their roles. One can only imagine what Engels would have made of a visit to the Old Trafford megastore. In that most peculiar of emporiums, fans of a soccer club with origins as a factory-worker team pay exorbitant prices for cheaply produced goods that are sewn and glued in Asia by the same class of women and children who toiled in the original “workshop of the world.” Many of the goods are tagged with “Made in Bangladesh” and “Made in China,” the same countries that were once forced to import machine-made cottons and yarns from Manchester, after the decimation of the Bengali textile industry, and after the gunboat diplomacy that opened China’s treaty ports to British concessions in 1842. Economic history can boast few examples with a more profound or ruinous irony.” [p. 109]

Ross’s book goes on to a much broader look at global production, with chapters on China, silicon wafers, and mental labor. A later chapter brings the story back to the heart of empire with a look at the 1996, largely gay-inspired, UNITE union campaign at Barney’s in Manhattan. It links the creative struggle of retail clerks who help establish and sell high-end fashions to that of the anti-sweatshop crusaders who have also developed innovative ways to re-frame corporate practices to make gains for workers.

“Low Pay High Profile” is a well-documented and revealing examination of the restructuring of work and markets across the planet. But this book is even better when put together with the remarkable work of Beverly Silver in “Forces of Labor.” She bases her study on data developed by the World Labor Group, of which she is a member. They have gone through back issues of the NY Times and London Times to find mentions of “labor unrest” since 1870, arguing that the two papers are the voices of their respective imperial centers and though they certainly do not record all instances of labor unrest, by charting the ebb and flow of such mentions, one derives a picture of global historical periods that appears remarkably accurate. Silver constructs a fascinating analysis of the complicated, nuanced, layered dynamics of labor unrest and capitalist perpetuation.

“The insight that labor and labor movements are continually made and remade provides an important antidote to the common tendency to be overly rigid in specifying who the working class is (be it the nineteenth-century craftworkers or the twentieth-century mass production workers). Thus, rather than seeing an “historically superseded” movement or a “residual endangered species”, our eyes are open to the early signs of new working class formation as well as “backlash” resistance from those working classes being “unmade.” A key task becomes the identification of emerging responses from below to both the creative and destructive sides of capitalist development.”

She makes good use of a double paradigm for understanding labor insurgencies” “Karl Polanyi-types” are ones characterized by “the backlash resistances to the spread of a global self-regulating market,” where workers or others are resisting the uprooting of traditional ways of doing things, or the destruction of their livelihoods, or the loss of their jobs. “Karl Marx-types” are those where “newly-emerging working classes” are fighting as they are fully subjected to market discipline and their collective power is strengthened as “an unintended outcome of the development of historical capitalism.” Silver sees world capitalism as swinging back and forth between a crisis of profitability and a crisis of legitimacy.

Against this overarching set of contradictory dynamics, she also smartly identifies “a continual struggle not only over defining the content of working-class “rights” but also over the types and numbers of access to those rights. How” and how quickly” a new crisis of legitimacy/profitability is reached is determined in large part by “spatial strategies”” efforts to draw “boundaries” delineating who will be “cut in” and who will be “left out.” This boundary drawing process is a key to understanding capitalist counterattacks against strengthening workers, but importantly it is also a key to understanding the way workers create identities (based on nation, race, gender, etc.) that distance them from self-identification as workers.

In a basic way, every trade union contract represents a stark example of this process of cutting some workers in and others out. To return briefly to the landmark M&M agreement, whatever arguments one may have about its effect on the internal politics and hierarchies within the ILWU, clearly the agreement’s success for longshoremen was inadvertently at the expense of the new global working class. Containerization has been the crucial technological means to make it worthwhile to forcibly integrate new populations into capitalist production, i.e. pulling/throwing them off the land and into factories (a.k.a. primitive accumulation).

“Forces of Labor” also breaks down different ways capital alters the terrain of contestation” product fix, technological fix, spatial/geographic fix, financial fix. A detailed discussion of the leading industry of the 19th century, textiles, is juxtaposed to a similar treatment of the 20th century’s lead industry, automobiles. Ultimately Silver attacks the premise of a “race to the bottom,” arguing that class struggles have been displaced by the aforementioned fixes, never eliminated and never put to rest. Here her argument nicely fits with Ross’s coverage of the ways that the textile industry, and by extension silicon wafers and even the new “voluntary army of low-wage professionals” exemplify the process of shifting struggles and labor market transformations.

She applies her theory to the present and future, trying to guess which industry might play a “leading’ role in the 21st century, and while unsure, she points to education (producing workers), and transportation (moving everything around) as likely candidates. She’s also unabashed in predicting that the next wave of “Marx-style” labor unrest will appear in China.

Here we must return to Andrew Ross for a more nuanced look at the dynamics of education. Clearly the crisis in education is directly related to the changing labor needs of capital. Ross covers the rise of new unions on campuses but goes a lot further than that. The demise of tenure-track teaching positions and the replacement of the traditional university professor by adjunct (temp) lecturers and technology (distance learning) goes together with deeper changes in what people are learning in the university. Ross develops an argument that describes

“”¦the structural eventuality of being trained in the habit of embracing nonmonetary rewards” job gratification is self-actualizing” as compensation”¦ fundamentally characteristic features of the academic work style, like those of artists”¦ conform to the demands of a contingent labor profile”¦ As part of its ceaseless search for ways to induct workers in their own self-exploitation, capital, it might be said, has found the makings of a self-justifying, low-wage workforce, at the very heart of the knowledge industries so crucial to its growth and development.”The education system (both at the high school and collegiate levels) is overdeveloped in relation to the needs of an economy that will only provide so many meaningful jobs that pay a living wage”¦ [A]t a time (quite distinct from the Fordist era) when creative gratification is more and more touted as an obligatory feature of the realm of no-collar work, the collective educational capital that once stimulated and supported consumption and leisure time is more and more invested in gray areas of unwaged work that the new cultural economy is creating”¦ All in all, the creation of the World Wide Web has been the most massive, uncoordinated effort in the history of unwaged work. Education is not, then, wasted, as it appears at first sight. Rather, it is being unsystematically converted into un- or undercompensated labor in ways that remain to be adequately charted (just as the hidden costs of unwaged domestic labor of women have sustained the economy for so much longer).”

The old paradigms and platitudes about workers, unions and organizing need to be revisited. Institutional power based on traditional economic roles is steadily eroding. But working class power is never vanquished. It moves and reinvents itself with remarkable resiliency. These two books advance our understanding of the times we live in and our potential for wresting control over our collective futures.

Change-alulah!

Went to catch the Reverend Billy Shopapocalypse Tour at the Victoria Theater last night. As usual I’m ‘out of step’ with my ‘community’ of aging lefties (most of the audience) who seemed to delight in everything about the show. While I consider Bill Talen an ally and want very much to support him and his interventions against Wal-Mart, Starbucks, et al, I really don’t like the “Church of Stop Shopping” politics. It’s a weird cross between Adbusters neo-Christian populism, and New Age group therapy.

Worse than that is the overall inarticulateness of Billy’s adlibbing. I never imagined that he would be drawing blanks, repeating cliches, and leaving points unsaid and incomplete so often. In general I think he’s a fine actor, but I don’t think he’s much of a writer, finally. The Stop Shopping shtick works as street theater, but not so well as a gospel revival, unless you are just soft for that form, or really think the problem of our ridiculous and oppressive daily life can be solved by simple withdrawal. But what I really fear is that the overall shallowness of this program is another manifestation of Orwell’s prescience.

Continue reading Change-alulah!

Otherizing in Northern California

Spent the bulk of the long weekend at a bucolic bit of land west of the Mendocino town of Willits. The denizens call it “Witness Peak” and there is a spectacular small volcanic peak right in its midsts, along with a variety of rolling poison-oak covered hills, beautiful buildings built over the past decades, and a pile of good friends. Getting there is a bit of an ordeal, a 3.5 hour drive at full speed, rather longer with friends who like to stop a lot and take a more meandering pace.

One of our pauses came in the misnamed “Old Downtown” of the new ex-urb of Windsor. I knew Windsor back in the 1970s when I went to Sonoma State and lived for a while in Forestville, working at the Books Inc. in Coddingtown in Santa Rosa. Loretta, my then-manager, had a place in Windsor, and I don’t recall there being anything like a center or a real town… just a crossroads with a gas station and a minimart, surrounded by an indeterminate number of ranch houses and farms.

Now Windsor’s “Old Downtown” is like Disney’s Celebration in Florida, a few dense blocks of fake old buildings full of condos and chainstores, faux antique lamp posts and an immaculate, orderly, antiseptic anti-hominess that must reassure someone that the chaos and uncertainty of urban life have been permanently barred from entry. It seems that WhiteLand is the overriding goal of such exurbs, even when a smattering of upscale BUPpies and Asian professionals sometimes give ethnic cover to the larger social agenda of segregation. We couldn’t help but wonder, as we clutched our gourmet caffeinated beverages and sped out of there as fast as we could, what will the first political demonstration there look like? When will it happen? What will it be about? Most of the answers I can quickly conjure up aren’t very inspiring…

I so rarely go to the exurbs, let alone the suburbs (which are decaying as I write, soon to be the new slums of the 21st century, as the frightened keep moving further out and the bored move back in to the urban core). Passing through a place like Windsor reminds me about my separation from what passes as ‘normal’ America, confronting me with my own version of “Otherizing.”

A brief pause for a word from our sponsor for today’s Blog entry:

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And now back to our irregularly scheduled blogging…

Hugh D’andrade did a great job of addressing this larger chasm between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in his article in The Political Edge called “Interrupting the Monologue”. Going from the Mission District to any exurb is to immediately face this; to properly digest it is to at least pause long enough to notice that the rhetoric of radical change is not obvious nor particularly resonant in such a place. Which might make us stop and think about how our ideas connect to people who are making quite different choices, usually motivated by substantially different ideas of what being alive feels like, what the range of dangers and challenges is that we face as humans, and so on.

With alarming frequency, people attracted to radical change aren’t really interesting in finding out what people think and do, but merely who they are. And judging all these human books by their covers, we make up our (often smug) minds about the relative stupidity or venality of these others. I know that the preponderant reality of such judgementalness and racism in the United States is that semi-automatic fear and intolerance that greets people of color when they venture into the ever-larger segregated regions. Nevertheless, I am deeply frustrated and offended by the corresponding racism that is being reinforced unconsciously by a fair number of activists engaged in promoting an agenda of ‘confronting white supremacy’ in ALL spheres of life.

This is a big topic, and one that deserves careful thought and argument. So I won’t claim to make my whole argument in this blog entry, and I don’t expect anyone on any side of this ongoing cultural discussion to have the last word. But the symmetry between a blindly racist culture and an obsessive and judgemental subculture of opposition is striking. The framing of the discussion with terms such as ‘privilege’ is particularly disheartening if we take seriously the notion that revolutionary change depends on the active participation of the majority of society. If the starting point to be accepted as politically relevant and involved is to publicly renounce your supposed ‘privileges’ (as opposed to, say, being a resolute opponent of institutional bigotry, social exploitation, toxic poisoning of whole communities, etc.) isn’t it obvious that an awful lot of people aren’t going to join in (unless they have a personality that is comfortable with cult-like self-renunciation)?

It belies a certain psychological immaturity to frame radicalization this way. All white people are not privileged because they’re white! If they are treated with respect by police when stopped that is not a privilege (though it is clearly a surprise!), but it is a right being denied others who are not treated the same. If they can walk in to a business and be treated courteously (so they’ll spend money there in the crucial cycle of exploitation that commodity society depends on), that is not a privilege, but it is a right being denied others who are not treated the same. “Access” is not available to everyone, whether it’s access to college, to a TV or radio talk show, the basic goods of consumer society, or even just food and shelter. Inequality of access is a symptom of a hierarchical society that produces nothing as well as it produces divisions and separations.

Affirmative action programs claim to ameliorate the problem of access. But these programs were created to halt the civil rights demands that were pushing into every sphere of life, demanding a real egalitarianism, one which threatened to up-end the logic of capitalist society. Affirmative action promised equal access, but really served to limit political and social demands in a way to reinforce the underlying (false) logic of meritocracy, of personal responsibility for success. The counterattack on quotas and set-asides was a completely predictable outcome of accepting the logic of this tepid reform in place of a more thorough-going restructuring of society.

Anyway, this topic is long and tangled. I wanted to use this entry to broaden the topic a bit from the usual black-and-white focus that it assumes so easily. I finished two books this weekend that did a bit of helpful juijitsu on my own frames of reference. First, Donna Haraway’s pocket-sized “Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness” (Prickly Paradigm Press: Chicago, 2003), and second, Mike Davis’s “Magical Urbanism: Latinos Reinvent the U.S. Big City”(Verso, 2000). I hope no one will take offense that a thread of this discussion is about to be the relationship between humans and dogs. It is not an analogue or a substitute for the problematic relations between white and black America. But it is a way of sidestepping our own predictable and somewhat automatic thoughts and responses, turning our attention to a different kind of relationship that doesn’t usually get an historical or political look, and at least in my case, is a good place to examine fixed ideas.

Davis’s book about Latino inmigration and urban transformation is an important update to our sense of who lives in the cities and what are the real dynamics of populations, municipal governance, entitlements, competition and cooperation. Though Davis is direct in his call for a black-Latino alliance, one that works through rank-and-file trade unionism, his book also uncovers some of the more difficult problems facing these two large communities as they confront the inequalities and injustice of the larger society but find themselves increasingly pitted against one another in a zero-sum (non)game of urban survival. (I’m not going to review his book further than that, but I do recommend it as an important corrective to the rear-view mirror urban politics that still predominates in the U.S.)

Haraway’s manifesto confronts my own deeply held prejudice against dogs. I have been allergic all my life, which might have to do with the fact that I was bitten in the face at age 3 by an aging and grumpy dog that was about the same height as me, but I have grown to resent the infantilization of pets in general and dogs in particular (that I’ve witnessed all too many times). I can respect someone loving their dog and having an intense relationship with it, but I just hate the mislogic of treating a dog like a child, or presuming it has a ‘right’ to be brought in to any space open to the public, as though it were a human with equal rights. Haraway probably agrees with me about that, and her ornery, thoughtful independence is why I really enjoyed her manifesto. She doesn’t cater to the American pet owner at all, but tries to take a much deeper and longer look at the historically specific relationships between dogs and humans over the long haul.

The paradigmatic story has it that

“Man took the (free) wolf and made the (servant) dog and so made civilization possible. Mongrelized Hegel and Freud in the kennel? Let the dog stand for all domestic plant and animal species, subjected to human intent in stories of escalating progress or destruction, according to taste. Deep ecologists love to believe these stories in order to hate them in the name of Wilderness before the Fall into Culture, just as humanists believe them in order to fend off biological encroachments on culture.
“These conventional accounts have been thoroughly reworked in recent years… I like these metaplasmic, remodeled versions that give dogs (and other species) the first moves in domestication and then choreograph an unending dance of distributed and heterogenous agencies… I think the newer stories have a better chance of being true, and they certainly have a better chance of teaching us to pay attention to significant otherness as something other than a reflection of one’s intentions.”

Haraway’s book ranges across many philosophical points. In contemplating ‘significant otherness’ she comes down solidly in favor of specificity and against broad generalizations, a basic approach that I would like to promote for discussions of racism, too. Haraway, in her pursuit of understanding her own relationship to her dogs, jumps into the cyberworld of dog trainers and lovers and finds some smart people who help shape her argument. And it’s Haraway’s easy move from the specifics of her topic to the gnarlier areas where these ideas pop up by themselves that makes the Companion Species Manifesto so useful. Vicki Hearne, a famous companion animal trainer and language philosopher (died 2001), gives Haraway an opening to go deeper.

“Communication across irreducible difference is what matters [among companion species]. Situated partial connection is what matters; the resultant dogs and humans emerge together in that game of cat’s cradle. Respect is the name of the game… Just who is at home [in the animals trainers work with] must permanently be in question. The recognition that one cannot know the other or the self, but must ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship, is the key. That is so for all true lovers, of whatever species… I believe that all ethical relating, within or between species, is knit from the silk-strong thread of ongoing alertness to otherness-in-relation. We are not one, and being depends on getting on together… [Hearne’s] resistance to literalist anthropomorphism and her commitment to signficant otherness-in-connection fuels her arguments against animal rights discourse… She is against the abstract scales of comparison of mental functions or consciousness that rank organisms in a modernist great chain of being and assign privileges or guardianship accordingly. She is after specifity.”The outrageous equating of the killing of the Jews in Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, with the butchers of the animal-industrial complex… or the equating of the practices of human slavery with the domestication of animals make no sense in Hearne’s framework. Atrocities, as well as precious achievements, deserve their own potent languages and ethical responses, including the assignment of priority in practice. Situated emergence of more livable worlds depends on that differentiated sensibility.”

This passage does a nice job of confronting indirectly the philosophical retardedness that plagues so many people attracted to a political practice that consists mostly of veganism or guilt-tripping people over consumption. The easy application of complex historical narratives to the issue of the day (much like people bandying about the term ‘fascism’, though it is clearly more applicable than it was 20-30 years ago) makes the speaker sound uninformed, if not stupid. Historical amnesia and a cultural antipathy to any but romantic and nostalgic ideas of the past cripple us every day. Haraway’s eloquent plea for historical specificity in relations between species is one part of her analysis that I DO think applies much more broadly. And she can only make that argument because she’s spent so much time excavating real histories, examining the loaded ways language and philosophy shape inquiries, but coming out the other side firmly in favor of rigorous and uncompromising investigation, paying attention, giving respect, and learning to learn.

Here’s a last quote from Haraway to whet your appetite for more of this intellectually very fun and stimulating pamphlet:

“The introduction, from blasted peasant-shepherd economies, of Basque Pyrenean mountain dogs, who were nurtured in the purebred dog fancy, onto the ranches of the US west to protect Anglo ranchers’ xenobiological cattle and sheep on the grasslands habitat (where few native grasses survive) of buffalo once hunted by Plains Indians riding Spanish horses” along with the study of contemporary reservation Navajo sheep-herding cultures deriving from Spanish conquest and missionization” ought to offer enough historical irony for any companion species manifesto. But there is more. Two efforts to bring back extirpated predator species rehabilitated from the status of vermin to natural wildlife and tourist attraction, one in the Pyrenean mountains and one in the national parks of the American west, will lead us further into the web.”

And further she goes. By the end, I could almost imagine having a relationship with an animal again (I grew up with 3 cats and always feel a psychic affinity with cats when I meet them, which they usually reciprocate in allergy-inducing ways!). But I’ll leave it to Haraway to stimulate your own desires:

“When I stroke my landmate’s sensuous Great Pyrenees, Willem, I also touch relocated Canadian gray wolves, upscale Slovakian bears, and international restoration ecology, as well as dog shows and multinational pastoral economies. Along with the whole dog, we need the whole legacy, which is, afer all, what makes the whole companion species possible… Inhabiting that legacy without the pose of innocence, we might hope for the creative grace of play.”

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